installation 2020
(in cooperation with Patricia Joao Reis)
“The Medusa v. The Odalisque” is the artists’ ongoing research towards a critical reflection on the subject of visual pleasure in the age of digital entities.
The project is based on a fragment of a novel by David Foster Wallace, and as such examines the method of constructing fiction. “Infinite Jest” – the source in question – bears a fractal structure that follows the Sierpinski gasket, resulting in multiple levels of fictionality embedded in each other: two of its main subjects being entertainment and addiction.
The project “Medusa vs Odalisque” is an attempt to visually (and materially) represent a set described in the novel: an audience watching Medusa and Odalisque fighting each other to death or petrification. The main weapon of both opponents is their gaze, which – in case of both – has lethal power, and can be fought only with a use of mirrors and reflection. However, instead of hitting each other, their petrifying gazes fall on the audience, turning the viewers one by one into stones “until there’s nobody left in the seat animate enough to applaud”. [Wallace, 2011: 321]
Inspired by this description, the project “Medusa vs Odalisque” suggests presenting the spectatorship as a guilty pleasure of technology. As suggested in Wallace’s novel, the audience is submitted to a sort of punishment perpetuating the Medusa myth. The spectator is affected through visuality, metaphorically is ultimately disembodied by their own perception of the scene, or by being sensorial affected by the scene.
The exhibition consists of a collection of objects and images which engage the visitors in a spectacle of gazes.
*** “The Medusa v. The Odalisque” – B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; zone-plating laser holography by James O. Incadenza and Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.; holographic fight choreography by Kenjiru Hirota courtesy of Sony Entertainment-Asia; 78 mm; 29 minutes; black and white; silent w/ audience-noises appropriated from network broadcast television. Mobile holograms of two visually lethal mythologic females duel with reflective surfaces onstage while a live crowd of spectators turn to stone. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; PRIVATELY RE-RELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS
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